Poems of Two Wars

Laurence Binyon was a celebrated poet and art historian, who was a friend of both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Although over-age for military service in 1914, Binyon volunteered to serve on the front line as a medical orderly, an experience that directly informed his writing. Poems of Two Wars brings together for the first time the remarkable poems he wrote about both World War I and World War II. Binyon’s 1914 poem “For the Fallen” is considered by many to be the single most famous poem written about World War I, and the poem is still read at remembrance services and carved onto thousands of war memorials. But Binyon’s writings during the wars are substantial and as moving as his most well known works. Binyon not only wrote compelling poems about his time working in a battlefield hospital in France, but during World War II he penned some of the most powerful poems about the war written by a non-combatant, including “The Burning of the Leaves.” Poems of Two Wars reveals the scope and intensity of Binyon’s work and finally gives him his due as a skilled poet of some of history’s most violent conflicts.